"convert" string to bytes without changing data (encoding)

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 28 Mar 2012 23:58:53 -0400, Ross Ridge wrote:

> How does that in anyway justify Evan Driscoll maliciously lying about
> code he's never seen?

You are perfectly justified to complain about Evan making sweeping 
generalisations about your code when he has not seen it; you are NOT 
justified in making your own sweeping generalisations that he is not just 
lying but *maliciously* lying. He might be just confused by the strength 
of his emotions and so making an honest mistake. Or he might have guessed 
perfectly accurately about your code, and you are the one being 
dishonest. Who knows?

Evan's impassioned rant is based on his estimate of your mindset, namely 
that you are the sort of developer who writes code making assumptions 
about implementation details even when explicitly told not to by the 
library authors. I have no idea whether Evan's estimate is right or not, 
but I don't think it is justified based on the little amount we've seen 
of you.

Your reaction is to make an equally unjustified estimate of Evan's 
mindset, namely that he is not just wrong about you, but *deliberately 
and maliciously* lying about you in the full knowledge that he is wrong. 
If anything, I would say that you have less justification for calling 
Evan a malicious liar than he has for calling you the sort of person who 
would write to an implementation instead of an interface.


-- 
Steven